Hema explores her community’s historical and lived experience of colonization and civil war. As a child, her family often moved from one place to another and she eventually found herself questioning the bonds that communities and individuals make. This questioning was driven by the difficulty of answering what it truly meant to belong somewhere. Hema’s wide-ranging artistic practice combines embroidery, mythological imagery, bricolage, and installation, to name but a few instances of a keen inquiry into cultural identity. Hema states that her practice focuses on the human and universal aspects of the conflict. Her work is driven by the nostalgia of the numerous places she has called home and how each community belonging to those places grapples with concerns of language, culture, memory, myth, gender, and equality. Sri Lanka is a vibrant country with a multitude of overlapping and cultural trajectories, where many languages, religions, and historical communities coexist.